Corbow6:Holy fark! Did anyone catch that the dude who essentially made this new find possible was named Andrew Mercer. "For this he adapted a "directed evolution" technique developed last year by Andrew C. Mercer, who at the time was a research associate in the Barbas laboratory."

That's somewhat coincidental...

Oh yeah, Prototype. Didn't the first one have some kind of story about a particularly brooding hoodie?

Holy fark! Did anyone catch that the dude who essentially made this new find possible was named Andrew Mercer. "For this he adapted a "directed evolution" technique developed last year by Andrew C. Mercer, who at the time was a research associate in the Barbas laboratory."

Quantum Apostrophe:If the biological sciences had the same PR as NASA did in the '60s, you wouldn't need me...

Genetics gets lots of money, although like ALL of the sciences it could use more. The major reason we can;t go full steam ahead on developing radical human genetic technologies is because if we fark up, and we will, it will result in people who die or develop nasty forms of cancer. So we go slow, and most of what we develop is developed towards curing disease instead of "designer" enhancements. Where you will see adoption of designer genetics first will primarily be in agriculture, because it is a hell of a lot easier to get ethics approval to make bigger, meatier cows with better fat deposition characteristics.

Arsten:You're right. I extrapolated to a future possible position while actively saying "Now". Do'h.

Probably TALENs or their direct derivatives will never be the right tool. But some hybrid form of viral-delivery system, perhaps with TALEN or CRISPR (a similar system) like components will. Of course it would be way easier to do genetic engineering at the egg/sperm stage, or early embryonic at the very least, rather than in adults. But we can currently do rudimentary gene therapy in the eyes of adults for instance, so certain problems/tissues will always be more amenable.

Felgraf:Arkanaut: I don't think editing DNA is going to do much for your looks after you reach adulthood.

I dunno. If we're able to inject a person with something that goes, like, "If you see this sequence, delete and replace with X", you could probably fix some diseases that are 'caused' by your body producing farked up proteins/not producing the right proteins.

Or basically wipe out a lot of cancers.

Obviously that's still a ways away, I suspect.

we do that already with gene therapy, or at least so I understand the process, and IIRC we basically do a completely replacement of all the cells in our body about every 7 years or so, so IF you were able to infect every cell in your body with new DNA code that turned on or off certain genes, then it seems like yes, gradually you would be "reformed in favor of your new matrix" so to speak....thought he transition could be VERY weird....

So much this. I get called in to big companies all the time to fix up clusterfark code that previous dev teams charged seven figures for. The thought of seeing the equivalent in living, breathing, suffering creatures makes me shudder. . .

Our ancestors wished they could program themselves and give them a leg-up against the rest of the world.

Now we are in a position to do that

But Jesus, cman. He would frown because I don't know.

I predict DNA editing and stem cell research will quickly become like abortion for the folks with religious objections - their case will be the exception, the one case where it's acceptable, because, well, that's different. But they'll still oppose it for anyone else.

I predict that people with an axe to grind will pop a hamstring to denigrate those not on their end of the political and/or religious spectrum, using a story without a religious or political slant.

Our ancestors wished they could program themselves and give them a leg-up against the rest of the world.

Now we are in a position to do that

But Jesus, cman. He would frown because I don't know.

I predict DNA editing and stem cell research will quickly become like abortion for the folks with religious objections - their case will be the exception, the one case where it's acceptable, because, well, that's different. But they'll still oppose it for anyone else.